Virtual internships are helping companies expand recruiting reach

The summer of the virtual internship may have been short on baseball outings, picnics and water cooler bonding, but it has landed some real jobs for graduating college seniors.

It also has some companies rethinking traditional on-site summer internship programs as a recruiting tool.

“This is the most significant thing to happen in talent acquisition in 20 years,” said Greg Watkins, who heads up hiring at M. Holland, a Northbrook, Ill.based plastics company. “Probably half of our interns going into next year are going to be remote.”

When the pandemic hit in March, the corporate world shifted on the fly to a work-from-home paradigm. Some companies canceled their summer internship programs, while others pivoted to remote solutions, offering future titans of industry a chance to learn the ropes from their parents’ basement.

There are about 600,000 to 700,000 college internships per year nationwide, with employers hiring about 55% of those interns for full-time jobs, according to Edwin Koc, director of research and public policy for the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

More than 1 in 5 companies canceled their summer 2020 internship programs entirely, while 70% of the companies that brought on interns conducted some or all of the program virtually, Koc said.

Like the corporate world at large, the makeshift virtual internships proved more successful than many expected.

Longtime Accenture executive Lee Moore was promoted to head the consulting firm’s Midwest region March 1 — just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. After getting 11,000 employees in 14 states working remotely, he turned his attention to 100 college and graduate students hired to start a 10-week “summer analyst” internship program across the Midwest in June.

“One of the first decisions I had to make was, what are we going to do with these people?” said Moore, a British native based in Chicago.

Moore decided to “push ahead” with the internship program, an important talent pipeline, and go fully virtual. The reinvented program included a virtual homeroom for interns to “hang out” with each other, a self-directed training curriculum and an abundance of online face time with Accenture executives and clients they might not otherwise have met.

“The interns didn’t have the social side of going to work with everyone because everyone was under lockdown,” Moore said. “But the work was actually as good, if not maybe better, for the interns because in this virtual world, you can be a bit more inclusive in meetings.”

Moore said most of the interns were hired in August for full-time analyst jobs upon graduation.

One of those job offers went to Sydney DeHorn, 22, a business major from Glenview, Ill., who is finishing her final semester at Michigan State University.

She was part of Accenture’s on-site summer internship program in 2019 and did the virtual program this year from her family’s summer cottage in Michigan. Initially disappointed, DeHorn was surprised to find the virtual version a better experience.

“This summer brought more opportunities to the table because I was able to meet with so many people virtually,” DeHorn said. “But also, I really had the opportunity to spend most of my summer with my family, which I probably wouldn’t have done before.”

DeHorn is set to start working remotely for the Chicago office — likely from her parents’ Glenview home — early next year.

While Moore called the success of the virtual office a “revelation,” he expects DeHorn and other employees to log some time in the physical office once the pandemic subsides.